Go Rimbaud â€“ Songs In Bad Taste (CD)

When I heard their â€œGround Zero Tourist Songâ€ EP, I fell immediately in love with Go Rimbaud (now Angels Fight the City). A modern day Velvet Underground, fed with valium and sugar, Go Rimbaud is a four piece band that play a music that is all but describable. Moving between pop, industrial, camp singalongs, and many other forms of music, Go Rimbaud (itself lifted from an equally innovative Patti Smith song in â€œHorsesâ€) is a band that works as well in six songs as in two â€“ this is definitely not a novelty act we are talking about. All and all, â€œSongs in Bad Tasteâ€ is utterly compelling, although without another track quite as innovative as â€œGround Zero Tourist Songâ€. Clocking in at a meager 26 minutes, I found myself immediately wanting more from this quartet.

After covering the first EP, I believe that â€œGround Zeroâ€ was actually included on here in a cleaned-up form, ending quick masterfully with an absolutely insane bass line, worthy of any Fall song. Moving back in time to the mid-1970s, when The Stooges, Television, and the Talking Heads were still rock royalty, the follow-up track â€œSt. Andrews Girlâ€ mixes in a great deal of souther delta-blues riffs with the traditional rock formula, while â€œMary Bell Bluesâ€ sedates the terror-inducing sounds of Suicide with a Sonic Youth fuzziness. The country â€œFrankensteinâ€ is reminiscent of one of my earlier bands, The Spackys, and our goth-country epic â€œMarilyn Mansonâ€. Bouncy sounding, â€œCollateral Damageâ€ is probably the most radio-friendly track on the whole disc, and it really gets its power from having an early-nineties industrial sound to it.

So, Go Rimbaud has shown that they can put out a longer CD and still have that spontaneity, that irreverent humour, and most of all, that freshness that makes them such a memorable band. The jam session at the end of â€œIf You Canâ€™t Take a Joke You Can Get the Fuck Out of My Houseâ€ is a perfect end to this disc, a disc in which we have so many different styles, styles that only coalesce at the end, to match the uniformity of the silence that follows.